HS03 - A Visible Darkness

by Michael Gregorio

  The ‘lobsters’ down on the beach below were tall, strong creatures. They strutted along the pebble shore in stiff leather uniforms which hampered their every movement. Leather breeches, thighhigh leather waders, a stout leather jerkin with a pouch in the front, and a large leather cap. Some of them were armed with spears; others with nets attached to long poles.

  At the second trumpet blast, they waded out into the water.

  The ‘prodders’ began pricking at the sea-bed with their spears, the ‘catchers’ swept their nets in the waves, throwing away the weeds and rubbish, keeping any amber that they happened to find, storing it in the pouches of their waterproof clothing. Bubbles of air trapped inside the amber make it relatively buoyant in water, Hartmann wrote. The more air, he said, the better it floats. Yet the quantity of air is in inverse proportion to its commercial value. The finest-quality amber—denser material than the amber-gatherers would find—lies buried deep beneath the shingle.

  Colonel les Halles intended to dig for it with his machines.

  I glanced from the workers to the French barge.

  Here it was, then, a vision of the industrial future in the form of the coq du mer; and material evidence of Prus sia’s disappearing past in the shape of the amber-girls. The amber-fishers described and drawn by Hartmann were mainly men, but in more recent times, it had become a job exclusively for women. They asked for, or accepted, less, I suppose. I watched them for some time, thinking now and then to catch a glimpse of Edviga Lornerssen. It was impossible to distinguish one girl from her neighbour. In their leather uniforms and sou’westers, any one of them could have been Edviga.

  And any one of them could be the next victim.

  I turned away, praying to the Lord to keep a watchful eye on those women, as I went to breakfast. To my surprise the officers’ mess was empty. Where were the French? Were they all down on the shore already? Les Halles had promised to work them hard, after all. I helped myself to a piece of bread, and a lukewarm cup of toasted corn. Five minutes later, I hurried to the gate, intending to requisition a horse and return to the Ansbach farm.

  A French soldier was repairing a broken saddle beside an empty stall.

  ‘All gone,’ he grunted, forcing a stout needle into the leather. ‘Something important’s going on this morning. There’s not one left.’

  His flat nose, the bridge collapsed, the nostrils wide and fuming, spoke all too clearly of some ravaging venereal illness.

  I tied my heavy Gaulisches together by the laces, hung them around my neck, and began to walk along the path to Nordbarn. The weather was not so stiflingly hot as the previous day, thank God. I did not try to take the route that I had ridden the night before with Adam Ansbach as my guide. So long as I followed the rutted track, I knew that I would get there in one piece.

  Eventually, I caught sight of Nordbarn.

  The workshop of Pastoris was strangely silent. No whirring grindstones could be heard that morning. Had the bees abandoned the hive? As if in answer to my question, the door opened and Pastoris himself appeared on the threshold.

  I stopped, waiting for him to come across and join me. If his people were up at the farm, I thought, surely he intended to join them there. He settled himself against the door-frame, instead, as if expecting me to go to him.

  I raised my hand and waved.

  He did not shift or reply. Even at that distance, his goitre rested on his chest like a second head. Remembering his cataracts, I wondered whether he had failed to recognise me. I took a step in his direction, intending to tell him that I would welcome his presence when the time came to interrogate Adam and Magda Ansbach. Surely, they would think of him as a reassuring old friend.

  The ‘old friend’ withdrew inside his door.

  I heard it slam, then the harsh rasp of metal bolts being drawn.

  I recalled his protectiveness towards his employees the night before. Did he wish to shield the women from what was happening up at the farm? If he wanted to restore peace in his workshop, my presence would only remind them all of the body in the pigsty.

  I turned back to the path, my mind racing ahead to the task which awaited me.

  This morning, I would be obliged to make a thorough examination of the corpse. I would have to establish precisely how the girl had been murdered. And I would need to sift through the pig-slime in search of the probable presence of a piece of amber, or some other clue.

  If I did find amber, what would it signify? That both the girls were thieves? That both of them were pregnant and had attempted to rid themselves of an unwanted child by provoking a spontaneous evacuation of the foetus?

  And what if I found nothing?

  What if the pigs had swallowed the amber as greedily as human flesh?

  I veered to the left and walked through the rough grass towards the stunted trees which marked the perimeter of the Ansbach farm. As I left the silence of the Pastoris workshop behind me, I began to distinguish a different noise, a noise that I recognised, though I was still a quarter of a mile from my destination.

  Was someone doing the washing?

  I might have been at home. Every Tuesday morning, Lotte piles the dirty linen into a large barrel in the kitchen by the water-pump. A layer of stockings and hose on the bottom, then a generous sprinkling of grey ashes and lye made from crushed cinders. A layer of undergarments after that, then more lye and ashes. Shirts, blouses, bed-sheets, each layer separated by ashes and lye. When the barrel is filled with water, Lotte presses down hard on a paddle that enters through a hole in the lid. Manni and Süzi often watch her as she labours. The harder she presses, the ruddier her large face grows. Which will burst first, Lotte’s cheeks or the ribs of the barrel? But what delights the children most is the sound the washing makes. Air gets trapped inside the sheets and the clothes. As she pushes downwards, it comes bursting out in an endless succession of rude noises. ‘Big farts,’ as Manni learnt to call them, from Lotte herself, who laughs out loud whenever she—that is, the washing-tub—produces them.

  As I approached the Ansbach farm, the noise grew louder.

  I passed the house, and marched towards the pigsty. The noise was coming from there.

  While still at a distance, I saw a strange tableau before the door of the pig-sty. Colonel les Halles was not on board the coq du mer. He was there at the Ansbach farm, standing in the very centre of the group, directing operations of some sort. A man was seated nearby on a camp-stool, writing notes as les Halles dictated them. Soldiers in rolled-up shirt-sleeves were working the handles of a very large pump. Two men pressed down on one side, two more pulled up on the other side, and with a loud organic eruption the contents of the pigsty began to spout out in a shower from a pipe that a fifth man was obliged to hold in his hands, his face distorted by a grimace of revulsion. Beside him, another soldier was standing with a bucket in his hands.

  They were evacuating the pigsty.

  My heart, lungs and brain seemed to seethe and gush in syncopated rhythm with the pump. I began to run towards them. I should have guessed when I spotted Hans Pastoris so surly. He had known what was going on. He must have thought that I was a party to it, and that it was the proof that I was in league with the French. Probably he believed it was all my idea.

  I stopped before the pigsty.

  If the curious onlookers had eliminated all signs of entrance and exit from the building the night before, les Halles was literally destroying whatever hope I had of finding anything useful in that sludge.

  ‘Colonel les Halles,’ I shouted, preparing myself for a confrontation.

  He did not deign to look at me, but carried on dictating. ‘One hundred per cent effective. Six downward strokes for compression. Water to cleanse the nozzle. Eighty per cent immersion of the suction tube. Twenty per cent air content facilitates the degree of evacuation . . .’ He turned to me and said: ‘Oh, you are here, then.’ It was not a greeting, it was a statement of fact. He turned again to his amanuensis. ‘Cancel the last sentence,’ he sna
pped.

  ‘I am the magistrate in this case,’ I said, equally sharply. ‘You are interfering with the scene of a crime. Indeed, you’ve managed to spray away whatever signs the murderer may have left behind him, and cover half of the farm with it.’

  He smiled at this rebuke.

  ‘You needed to free the corpse from the sludge, did you not? I wanted to calibrate the aperture of the tube which will suck up material of similar consistency from the sea-bed. I’d call it co-operation. This experiment provided the opportunity to solve a problem of dynamics which dogged my efforts yesterday. On the other hand, you’d have been here for hours with buckets and shovels. I’ve saved you the trouble. You ought to thank me.’

  My anger mounted.

  ‘That body could have been easily moved, if that was what I wanted,’ I replied. ‘But that was not my only aim. I intended to search the place for any clue which might indicate a link between the murdered women. Amber, for example. Remember the piece that we found in the corpse of Kati Rodendahl? You didn’t think of that! I’ll be obliged to mention this fact in my report to the general . . .’

  ‘Before you waste more breath,’ he interrupted, ‘you will be pleased to learn that I have found something. It will interest you, I am certain of it.’

  He placed his hand on his hip, and stared at me, smiling broadly. Then, he turned to the man holding the tube: ‘Show him what you found in the filter, Blanc.’

  Private Blanc dropped his hose, and picked up a large, deep jute sack. He brought it to me, and held the bag open, inviting me to reach inside it, which I did. Finding nothing, I was obliged to reach in further. And further again, before my finger was pricked by something cold and damp at the very bottom. I closed my fist around the objects, then quickly pulled my hand from the fetid sack.

  ‘Fragments of bone,’ les Halles spoke out.

  I opened my palm, and examined the slime-shaded slivers and splinters.

  ‘We found a lot of them,’ he said. ‘They certainly don’t belong to the corpse in there. Other bodies have been buried here less recently. Clearly, this was a private burial ground, Herr Magistrate. I bet we’ll find the remains of all the other girls who have gone missing.’

  Again, he did not give me the opportunity to speak.

  ‘I am satisfied,’ he roared on boldly. ‘They are the equivalent of amber. My engine sucked them up and spat them out. If we do half so well on the coast, the coq du mer will be a great success.’

  ‘Colonel,’ I interrupted him, ‘these finds might well have been important. Now, however, they are useless. We do not know precisely where they were located inside the pigsty. Nor can we say how deeply they were buried in the slime. They could be chicken wings, or dead pigs. There may even be some human bones, as well. But any fragments of clothing or flesh that had not already decomposed have been destroyed thanks to you and your “well calibrated” pump.’

  He stared at me, and a frown of annoyance scarred his brow.

  ‘You have your bones, what more do you want?’ he said.

  ‘I want to question the Ansbachs,’ I said.

  His confidence returned as he considered this request.

  ‘They’re in Nordcopp,’ he said offhandedly. ‘You’ll have to go there if you want to interrogate them. I had them taken into custody this morning. They are being held in the town gaol . . .’

  ‘In gaol?’ I said, as if the word were new to me. ‘On what charge? On the basis of what proof?’

  ‘Murder. That’s the charge,’ he said, as if the judgement were a foregone conclusion. ‘I’ll leave you to find the proof, and tie up loose ends. Things will soon return to normal here, mark my words! There’ll be no danger of a repetition of the crime. Indeed, as a direct result of this successful trial run with the pumping engine, I expect to send the women on their way in a week or two. They’ll be out of harm’s way. If any danger still remains, that is. The amber mining industry will be supervised by men. My own.’

  He seemed to have satisfied himself that the case was closed. Of course, a report would have to be sent to General Malaport. He would sign it with a flourish, I would countersign it in much smaller letters at the bottom of the page, and that would be the end of the story. He had found the Prussian scapegoat he was looking for, but that is not the same thing as arresting the perpetrator. There was no incontrovertible evidence, much less an open admission, that Adam Ansbach had been trafficking with the girls from the coast, let alone murdering them.

  I took the Gaulisches from around my neck, set them down on the ground, slipped my shoes inside, then pulled the leather straps tight. I had been carrying them for over an hour. It was time to put them to good use. Les Halles watched what I did, but I did not say a word to him.

  ‘Do you intend to examine the corpse, monsieur?’ he enquired.

  Again, I did not answer him, but made straight for the pigsty.

  I heard him tell his men to leave off pumping. Then, he strode across to me. ‘Shall I tell the men to come in with us?’ he asked, puffing as he struggled to keep pace with me.

  ‘Enough damage has been done,’ I muttered to myself.

  He nodded, but there was a hint of irony in his voice. ‘Just you and I, then?’

  ‘You and I,’ I replied, bending low, ducking beneath the door.

  The sea of sludge had been entirely removed, stripped away. Indeed, as I stepped inside, I plummeted down a sharp slope. The slime had been sucked out, together with a great deal of the dark, stained, underlying soil. The smell was strong, but it was different from before. The musty smell clogged the air. The roof had been ripped away on one side of the sty to let in light.

  Only the body seemed immune to change.

  She was sitting in the far corner of the sty, her head hanging down, her chin resting heavily on her breast, exactly as I had left her the night before.

  She might have been waiting for me.

  ‘Don’t you want the body carried outside?’ les Halles asked at my back.

  ‘Not yet,’ I said. ‘She needs to be examined inch by inch before she is moved.’

  ‘Get on with it, then!’ he groaned.

  As I bent to look at her, I heard his voice outside the pigsty, ordering his men to start packing up their equipment and get it loaded onto the carts, ready for its immediate return to the coast. I was glad that he was gone, though not comfortable to be alone with the corpse. The exposed skin of the arms, the bloody circles where her breasts had once been, the dark cavern of the ravaged stomach, had altered since the night before. She was now entirely black, her skin spotted with drops of dried mud and yellow slime.

  I reached out a finger and laid it on her forehead.

  It was warmer than I expected. It might have been an effect of the interminable organic decomposition of the slime in the sty, though I could not be sure. I slid my hand beneath hers, and lifted. Her stiff left arm came up. I repeated the operation with the right arm with the same result. Nothing was broken there.

  I felt for the bones in her legs, squeezing the rigid muscles between my thumb and forefinger. The bones of both legs were intact, though the pigs had caused great damage to the soft tissue of the calves and the lower legs.

  I closed my eyes for a moment and silently asked forgiveness to her, placing my hands flat against her blood-caked breast, pressing hard against the ribcage. Nothing cracked, nothing gave, which seemed to suggest that there was no internal damage to her upper body.

  I lifted her dress and looked up between her parted legs, moving my head left and right to take advantage of the light, searching in vain for amber hidden in that mass of meat and blood and innards. I did not have the courage to search with my fingers. If anything were amiss, it might be the work of man or swine. It was hard to imagine which was worse.

  I dropped the skirt-hem quickly.

  ‘What killed her?’

  Les Halles was standing behind me once again.

  ‘It is hard to say,’ I admitted.

  Her scalp w
as marked, despite the filth, by a clear line of division where her hair was parted in the centre.

  I lifted a lank, filthy curtain of hair away from her left cheek, bent down beside her, my face inches away from hers. She did not smell like any person I have ever met; no individual human odour could match the stench in that place. I examined her left ear and temple and felt her skull with my fingers.

  ‘No sign of cutting here,’ I said.

  I doubt that anyone who had known her would have recognised her face. The skin was mottled black and blue, swollen around her eyes, the lips, nose and cheeks shredded and torn. I could only say, as her hair fell back into place, that it had been blonde before she entered the pigsty.

  ‘What about the other side?’

  There was something blunt, practical, inhuman about the Frenchman. In that instant, I abhorred the sound of his voice, resented his interference, though he suggested no more than I would have done without his help.

  My hand grazed her cheek as I lifted the filthy, heavy hair away. My fingers trembled as I bent close. Dead flesh has a texture like no other. It was as if the life had evaporated out of her, leaving something behind which was human in shape alone.

  ‘Impossible to say what has happened . . .’ I said.

  ‘Adam Ansbach will tell you.’ Les Halles was burbling at my back like a brook in spring flood. ‘And if he does not, well . . . he will . . . But what do you think he wanted from her? And from the other girl, too, of course. Amber? Sex?’

  That was not the end, but I stopped listening.

  ‘She will need to be turned over,’ I said. ‘He may have stabbed her from behind . . .’

  Words failed me. So did my strength. I gathered just enough. It was concentrated in the tips of my fingers as I placed them on the point of her jaw and tried to lift the head up, pushing it backwards with all the force that I could manage.

  As the head lolled back against the meeting of the walls, I believe I may have cried out. Certainly, I fell backwards, and I felt the cold dampness soak quickly through the seat of my trousers.